An Idea That Doesn’t Die

Binyamin Rose

Kahanism’s comeback and the rise of Otzma

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Y

ou can assassinate a radical, but you can’t kill his ideas.

Israel knows that all too well. All of the targeted assassinations they have pulled off against terrorists may have felt like sweet revenge, but there’s always another radical waiting in the wings to step into his boots.

This paradigm helps explain the renaissance of the Otzma Yehudit party — often referred to as the ideological descendant of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach Party — which is running again in next month’s Knesset election 30 years after Israel’s election commission banned Kach for its “racist manifesto.”

Kahane was gunned down on the streets of Manhattan in November 1990 by an Egyptian-born US citizen, but the rabbi’s ideas lived on. Kahane failed three times before finally winning a single seat in the Knesset in 1984. He was a lone voice advocating for the transfer of Israel’s Arab population and calling on the government to adopt Torah laws, such as a ban on intermarriage and non-Jewish property ownership.

Most Israelis are more concerned about the price of cottage cheese than who owns cottages, but that being the case, further explanation is needed as to why the latest polls shows Otzma Yehudit may win as many as four Knesset seats in the April 9 election.

Part of that is the boost they got from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who orchestrated a merger between two warring interparty factions within Otzma Yehudit. Not because Bibi supports their agenda, but because he is fighting for his political survival, which is contingent on right-wing parties securing a majority.

For that, Netanyahu drew the wrath of AIPAC and a host of other Jewish-American organizations, who condemned him for raising the ghost of Kahane from the grave.

Many of these Jewish critics can’t seem to muster the same level of scorn for the freshman class of Democratic media darlings who promote a not too subtle anti-Semitic agenda alongside a radical leftist economic and political manifesto. The House of Representatives, in another stroke of political paralysis, barely issued a watered-down condemnation of these renegade representatives.

“A .22 for Every Jew”

But to truly understand the Kahane phenomenon, one has to return to the 1960s, where Meir Kahane was not yet a politician but gained prominence as a resolute promoter of Jewish self-defense.

In 1967, race riots broke out in many American cities, including Los Angeles and New York, as well as two New Jersey cities near my hometown of Passaic — Newark and Plainfield. Jewish merchants were impacted because of their close proximity to neighborhoods where minorities were the majority. The fear was palpable.

Jewish cemeteries and synagogues were desecrated. Police didn’t have enough manpower to spread around. In 1968, Kahane formed the Jewish Defense League (JDL), an organization that recruited young men willing to learn self-defense and take up arms to patrol Jewish facilities, first in Brooklyn and then in New Jersey. He coined the expression “Every Jew a .22.”

I was too young to bear arms but not too young to learn to use my own. I recall one gym class in my last year at Hillel Academy (now YBH of Passaic) where a judo instructor took over. (I still remember how to flip an attacker from the rear.)

That summer, riots erupted in Passaic over a landlord’s plan to raise rents in the tenements. JDL members arrived in Passaic to protect Jews. I remember the night my father pulled me off the softball diamond and sent me to an early shower because police had called for a curfew.

That’s the Meir Kahane I first knew. However, the organization built on self-defense soon went on the offense and lost its way and much of its support. A number of the JDL’s members and leaders, including Rabbi Kahane, were convicted of acts related to domestic terrorism. After Kahane made aliyah in 1971, the JDL turned even more radical, even as their former leader tried to remake himself as a politician. That venture proved to be short-lived, as his Kach Party was banned after one Knesset term. Two years later, Kahane was murdered.

Reality Hits Hard

Today’s Otzma Yehudit party puts on a kindlier and gentler face. There is no obeisance to Kahane in the party platform. It has tempered its calls for expulsion of Israel’s Arab population, replacing that with a clause encouraging emigration of Israel’s enemies. It mentions the primacy of Torah law without getting into specifics and calls for an uncompromising stance against territorial compromise in peace talks.

Israeli politics is very volatile, and in the past two elections, the polls that saw the Likud and Netanyahu heading to defeat were proven wrong. So it is too early to know if Otzma Yehudit will win enough votes to earn Knesset seats, and it’s certainly premature to say they will be a coalition partner.

However, it’s important to understand the political context, and that the rebirth of the Kahane ideals has not come out of left field.

We live in a world in which the political center has collapsed. All over Europe, parties on the far-right spout extreme doctrines as they vie for voters’ allegiances. Even in the US, politics is stuck in a quagmire between Trumpism and progressivism, and rising anti-Semitism on both extremes has shaken Jews out of their comfort zones. Israel faces its own anti-Semitic menace from a new generation of Arab children raised on a diet of Nazi propaganda fed to them from Palestinian Authority schoolbooks.

All these forces on the political playing field are threats to be reckoned with. Neither banning them, condemning them, wishing them away, or shrinking from them in embarrassment is going to help. Jews will have to find new ways to defend themselves, perhaps in ways that Meir Kahane would never have imagined.